


susurrus (the just one touch remix)

by badacts



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, M/M, Soulmates, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24833323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: Sam Wilson has a nice place. It’s also conveniently located across the street from a small park with several old, heavily-in-leaf trees with an excellent vantage of his windows.Clint, settled high in the canopy in the vee between two sturdy branches, watches a weary, limping Cap arrive fresh from the hospital throughbinoculars. It’s embarrassing that this is what his life has come to.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton, Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson
Comments: 26
Kudos: 359
Collections: Winterhawk Remix 2020





	susurrus (the just one touch remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Murmur in the Trees](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004818) by [dr_girlfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dr_girlfriend/pseuds/dr_girlfriend). 



> Yay, revealed! Thanks to drgirlfriend for putting yourself in for the remix, I had fun playing around with your fic because I love the pure ridiculousness of finding your soulmate the second you meet someone. And thanks to CB and mariana-oconnor for doing all the hard organising work!!

Clint gets the text in a dingy bathroom of a SHIELD safehouse in Kandahar. Unrecognised number, but this is the most modern and up-to-date StarkPhone, so it’s not like it’s gonna be some dude in Arkansas trying to text his drug dealer and getting Hawkeye instead.

“Screw it,” Clint mutters to his reflection, giving up on the sixth stitch in the wound on his arm and just slapping a dressing on it. Five sutures will be enough. He fumbles his phone off of the sink to check it.

It’s a number he doesn’t have saved but knows by heart. _Hydra is in SHIELD. Go to ground and get to DC ASAP. Trash this phone._

“What?” he mutters.

There’s a heavy knock at the door. Shoving his phone into the pocket of his jeans, he calls, “Yeah?”

“I need to piss,” replies the voice of Clint’s handler for this mission, George Fistal. 

“Hold your horses, I’m only barely not bleeding anymore,” Clint says amiably, sweeping the trash into his hand. “Okay-”

When he was a rookie nineteen year old idiot fresh out of prison and recruited straight into SHIELD, he’d had plenty of teachers to make him into an agent rather than a circus kid who’d been conned into killing people. The lessons that Phil Coulson taught him, though, were beaten into his muscle memory, and sometimes in fairly brutal fashion. They’d been the ones designed to keep him alive in situations where lesser agents die, so he can't exactly fault the guy, in retrospext.

That’s why he opens the bathroom door from _outside_ the doorframe, and thus avoids taking a bullet in the gut.

Fistal is fast. Clint is faster. He has the gun in his hand and Fistal on his knees on the bathroom floor before the echoes of the gunshot have even faded. 

“Hands on your head,” Clint commands. “C’mon, Georgie. I don’t have all day.”

“Fuck you,” Fistal replies. And Clint knew the man didn’t like him much, but the palpable hate in his voice is new. “You’re dead, you know that? A dead man walking.”

It’s nothing Clint hasn’t heard before, and from far more interesting people than a slightly overweight middle-aged man with a goatee. “You Hydra, George? Or are you just trying really hard to hurt my feelings?”

To Clint’s surprise, Fistal grins. “You, and Romanoff, and Rogers. You’re all dead.”

“Oh, I knew this job was missing something. Nonsensical rambling,” Clint says. “Seriously, hands on your head. I don’t want to shoot you even if you are a Nazi.” It’s more to do with the cleanup of all that DNA than anything else, but he’s not going to say that out loud. Yet.

“Hail Hydra,” Fistal spits, and raises his hands towards his head - and throws a knife he’s palmed that sticks a quarter inch deep in Clint’s chest. He _feels_ it hit bone and bounce back, in his rib and not, somehow, his aorta.

Then Fistal’s slumping back, a bullet hole between his eyes. 

“I always knew I had a reason for fucking hating you,” Clint says to Fistal’s corpse, removing the knife from his pec with a hiss. “Hail that, asshole.”

* * *

By the time he gets back to the States, he knows as much as everyone else does - the news cycle is just repeated footage of the Winter Soldier caught on security cameras wrecking a highway, helicarriers falling out of the sky and into the Potomac, and Natasha’s slim sharp figure in front of a council of global leaders spilling secrets.

Spilling _Clint’s_ secrets. He can’t exactly begrudge Nat that, when she’s doing the same with her own. And it’s not as though he doesn’t understand the concept of burning everything down and starting over.

He doesn’t tell her his flight details, but somehow she’s there at the curb when he walks out of the airport terminal. She's in a sleek black sedan, nothing flashy, sunglasses on behind the tinted windows.

She looks at him over those glasses from the driver’s seat as he slips inside. “No.”

“What’re you, my hair stylist? It’s not like I can rock a faux shoulder-length bob like you can,” Clint says. “Besides, we match. It’s cute.”

Her face says exactly what she thinks of that. Well, L’Oreal Mahogany Amber wasn’t exactly his first choice, but beggars can’t be choosers, and shoplifters sometimes have to pocket whatever is furthest from the security cameras.

She fishes a cellphone out of the cupholder and hands it over. “I’ve already ported over your contacts list.”

Clint’s contact list is all his local pizza places, a local fence who owns a dollar shop as his front, and Tony Stark’s personal number. “Hey, this is a new model.”

“Stark upgraded us all,” Nat replies, pulling out into the flow of traffic. 

“Bet he’s feeling fresh over rubbing shoulders with Hydra without knowing it. Am I allowed to ask where we’re actually going?”

“Wilson’s place.”

“Wilson - the bird guy?”

“Yes, _Hawkeye_ , the bird guy.”

“He looks cool.” It’s not everyone who can jump into their business and keep their heads. Wilson did that and better, by the video footage Clint's seen. Also, those wings are neat as hell.

“Steve certainly thinks so,” Nat says with a curving smirk.

“Are they banging?” Clint’s not sure how they would have found time for that while destroying SHIELD from the inside, but if anyone could do it, Cap could. 

“They’re _soulmates_ ,” she replies, with relish.

Clint jerks. “ _What_?”

“They were talking in the park, Steve helped him up, bam. The whole nine yards.”

“You were there?”

“Parked at the curb waiting for him to finish chatting the guy up.” From her expression, you’d think Nat had orchestrated the whole thing. 

“God,” Clint says, letting his head thump back on the headrest. “It’s not enough for him to be blonde, gorgeous and a superhero, huh? He also finds his soulmate in a _park_.”

“All his friends did die.”

“So what, all of us have had all our friends die at some point,” Clint grumps. “Besides, apparently not _all_ of them are dead.” 

He'd heard of the Winter Soldier before this, of course. Nat's run-in with him in Odessa is one of the more reliable reports, but he's heard the whispers his entire career. The guy's a bogeyman with an unconfirmed but enviable kill count, and it turns out he's been working for their attempted Nazi overlords since the forties. Also, he was Steve's bestie. The entire situation is weird as fuck.

“Might have been better off,” Natasha replies, attempting offhand but not quite hitting it to Clint’s ear. There's a history there besides Odessa, no doubt, but Clint's not asking and she's not telling.

“Any progress on finding him?”

“None,” Nat says. “All we had were a set of footprints that led to the nearest road, and then nothing. It was full daylight and we lost a dripping wet man in black leather with a metal arm in the middle of DC.”

“Well, he hasn’t stayed unidentified for eighty years by being bad at hiding,” Clint says philosophically. “Hey. You doing okay?”

“Of course,” Nat replies, with a shrug. That means she’s rattled but coping. That’s probably fair in both respects - all of them are alive, but the process of this has turned their entire lives upside down.

“Sorry,” Clint offers. There’s a little bit of him that says, _This is your fault. You brought her here, and then you weren’t even there to deal with the fallout._ He knew going in that shadowy government organisations are rarely free of shadiness, and he never needed to teach Black Widow to keep a kernel of healthy suspicion with regard to their employers. But he still recruited her as little more than a kid out of one corrupt organisation and straight into another. 

Natasha is incorruptible, and on his good days Clint knows he is as well. Nazis are a new one for him, though.

“Shut up Barton,” Nat says. There’s affection in her tone, though. She pulls up at the curb. “Your bow is in the trunk.”

“Are you...not coming?”

She hands him a pair of binoculars from the centre console. “No.”

* * *

Sam Wilson has a nice place. It’s also conveniently located across the street from a small park with several old, heavily-in-leaf trees with an excellent vantage of his windows.

Clint, settled high in the canopy in the vee between two sturdy branches, watches a weary, limping Cap arrive fresh from the hospital through _binoculars._ It’s embarrassing that this is what his life has come to.

“‘He’s in danger until we find the Soldier’,” Clint mutters to himself, rolling his eyes. “‘He hasn’t fully recovered and I don’t have time to babysit’.” It hasn’t escaped his notice that a supersoldier and his pararescue paramore are sitting inside the house, probably fondling each other's muscles and kissing, all the while being perfectly capable of defending themselves, and he’s out here sitting in a tree.

It’s possible that Nat is just trying to keep him busy. On the other hand, Steve did nearly die, so it’s not unreasonable to make sure the guy has some extra protection while his attempted murderer/ex-best-friend is still at large.

He sinks into the headspace of observance as darkness falls across the street. There’s a rush of people walking their dogs or getting groceries or visiting neighbours after the end of the workday, but it’s generally quiet. There’s certainly no sign of HYDRA gunships descending.

Steve and Wilson go to bed early - same bedroom, Steve’s apparently not as old-fashioned as all that - which is about when Clint starts to fantasise about his own bed. It’s fully dark in his perch now, the streetlights failing to penetrate the canopy. Even with his aids it’s impossible to hear ambient noise on his worse side, and his vision begins to turn the telescoping distorted of the heavily adrenalised after not nearly long enough. 

After midnight, he considers Wilson’s roof with a tilted head. He can probably use his grapple to hop across to Wilson’s backyard without being spotted. Then again, it’s only a two-storey, and no one is going to mistake him for a bat if he flies too close to the ground. Also, it’s maybe a little weird to post up outside Cap’s window. He’s not going to be looking in, not when he’s looking for threats, but still. 

His ass is numb and this tree is dissatisfying after hours of its company. Decision made, he strings his bow and pulls out a grapple arrow, pulling back past his ear.

Out of nowhere, a hand grabs his wrist.

All the coiled energy in his bowstring has to go somewhere. The arrow releases but goes wide, tapping the guttering before falling down into Wilson’s garden. And Clint, with the tight quick shock straight out of a horror film jump scare, jerks so hard he drops off of the branch.

It’s quite a way down. He’s wearing a bare minimum of body armour, because _no one was meant to assault him in a tree_. However, his years in the circus have given him the falling skills of an acrobat, so he doesn’t break anything when he lands on the grass. Probably.

He’s about to start a scramble upright when a big dark shape drops from above, pinning him to the ground by his throat.

The arm doing the pinning is metal, shining in the streetlamps. Clint thinks, _oh, shit_ , and kicks up to drive a hard knee into the Soldier’s belly.

The Winter Soldier is enhanced and has a cybernetic prosthetic far stronger than a human limb and nearly a hundred years of experience. Clint’s strengths are his smart mouth and the fact he’s a hell of a lot taller than the Soldier, and he plans to play to them. The pure leverage of his leg hitting the Soldier pops him off Clint like the shell off of a clam, sending him rolling across the footpath. Clint, unwilling to cede the advantage, gropes for his bow and the arrows scattered from his quiver in the fall.

“Barnes,” he says even as his fingertips brush the grip of his bow. The shape, clambering to its feet, pauses. “You seriously gotta have a bladder the size of a twenty-gallon drum.”

The Soldier flies at him again. Clint grapples and rolls with him, comes up on top, and then drives the EMP arrow he managed to grab into Barnes’ metal shoulder.

It’s a bit too much like stabbing someone for Clint’s taste - the arm goes dead with an inglorious whine, but the rest of Barnes’ body jerks underneath him like he’s seizing for several more moments. Then the fight goes out of him completely, leaving him limp and silent. 

“Aw fuck,” Clint says, because at no point did Natasha indicate that capturing the Soldier was a ‘dead or alive’ situation. “Don’t be dead-”

Which is right when Barnes’ flesh-and-blood hand jerks up and grabs his throat.

Clint has been choked more times in the last year than most people are during their entire lives. It’s impressive, really - he’s six-three, and he’s still somehow got a magnet attached to his adam’s apple that attracts the palms of people who really want to kill him. But the thing that’s impressive right now? Is the fact that this particular neck grab feels absolutely nothing like any of the others he’s ever experienced.

It’s like lightning. His heart skips, pauses, skips again and resettles. The tender skin over his trachea burns and tickles and hums.

Barnes’ hand falls away. He’s looking up at Clint, and there’s just enough light to see his face - unmasked, gaunt and horrified.

Clint says, “What the fuck?” right before he’s shoved backwards. Barnes awkwardly crab-crawls back out of reach, ending up in a crouch on the well-groomed park lawn with his metal arm hanging. Clint puts his hand to his throat, which is still buzzing, and finds himself struggling to catch his breath.

“No,” the Soldier - Barnes - says in a voice nearly incomprehensible with rust. It is, Clint realises, the first sound he’s made so far.

“What-?” Clint starts, right before he remembers with startling clarity sitting in a middle-school health class discussing sex and soulmates. The information had been light on the facts and heavy on the emphasis of saving yourself for your soulmate. The teacher, a twenty-something whose name Clint has long forgotten, had clasped her hands to her chest like an 1800s lady and simpered over the entire concept of soulmates.

Clint had been less interested in soulmates and more interested in irritating authority figures, even then. He’d asked, _how do you even know you’ve met your soulmate?_

 _It’s unmistakable,_ the teacher had said, smiling. _Like being hit by lightning. Of everyone on this planet, you’ve just touched skin with the one person meant to be yours. You’ll know._

Little shit Clint had asked, _so you’ve met yours?_

She’d frowned a little bit. _Oh, no. Not yet._

 _So how do_ you _know what it’s like?_

Maybe she read too many romance novels, but Clint actually owes her an apology for forcing her to stutter an answer to his rude-ass question, because she was goddamned right.

“Don’t go,” Clint stutters, throwing out a hand. “Just...stay there."

He looks at Barnes, who is looking back. Behind the mask and the metal arm and the unfortunate hair, it turns out the Winter Soldier is just a man. A man who is watching Clint like he just turned into a highly venomous snake.

Clint is about to say something - he doesn't know what - when a door across the street opens and the beam of a high-powered torch sears his retinas. “Fuck!”

“Not raccoons, then,” a bemused voice calls, and then there’s the click which, even to Clint’s shitty ears, is unmistakably a gun cocking.

Clint, recognising the position of the door through watering eyes, says, long-suffering, “Don’t shoot.” He’s about to continue with his usual, _I’m an Avenger. No, not Iron Fist_ , spiel, but he’s interrupted by approximately two hundred pounds of assassin hitting him at belly button height and knocks him flat. “ _Fuck!_ ”

He struggles violently for a second before realising that Barnes...isn’t doing anything. He’s just lying on top of Clint. Almost like he’s -

“Uh,” the man who must be Sam Wilson says from closer now. “Barn...Bucky?”

“No,” Barnes says monotone. His teeth are bared and his focus is firmly focussed on Wilson like he wasn’t trying to beat Clint up not minutes go. Because he’s now covering Clint’s body with his. Because he’s protecting Clint from being shot by Sam Wilson, who probably won’t shoot either of them because Sam Wilson probably doesn’t want to shoot his soulmate’s bestie or his soulmate’s...workmate. Because he’s protecting Clint. It’s wild.

“Sam, what’s,” a sleepy voice calls from the house. In about twenty seconds the neighbours are going to start coming outside too, but it’s fine, because it can’t possibly be worse than Steve Rogers stumbling out of bed and finding out that Clint is the soulmate of his brainwashed bro in this exact fashion.

“Bucky,” Steve is saying, and then when Bucky’s attention turns from Wilson to Steve with a flicker of recognition. “Is that _Clint_?”

“Uh, yeah,” Clint says. His voice is muffled by Bucky’s body armour. After a moment, said body armour lifts off of his face, and he finds himself the focus of an exceptionally piercing grey stare.

“You’re not Hydra,” Bucky says, brow furrowed, as though this is news.

“I’m _Hawkeye_ ,” Clint snaps, offended by the mere idea of being mistaken for a Nazi.

Then again, he did show up the day of Steve’s release from hospital, co-opt Barnes’ tree perch, and then make like he was going to shoot up the house in the middle of the night. It’s possible that this would appear suspicious to the casual observer, or, perhaps, a confused assassin.

“You’re my soulmate,” Bucky says. He says it like indisputable fact, and the words alone invoke almost the same sensation as that first skin-to-skin touch. Lightning.

“Yeah,” Clint agrees stupidly.

At the same time, Steve, eight feet away, demands, “ _What_?”

Natasha is never, ever going to let him hear the end of this.


End file.
